The Internet and the World Wide Web (“Web”) have changed the landscape of information delivery and affected numerous aspects of life. One benefit of this technological development is the ability to conduct business transactions globally via the Internet. As the volume of commerce conducted over the network continues to increase, collections of business units or organizations are working together to pool resources and expertise in order to achieve a common business objective. Organizations are sharing services and resources across enterprise boundaries in order to undertake collaborative projects that could not be undertaken individually or to offer composed services that could not be provided by individual organizations.
A growing array of workflow automation technologies has emerged to help organizations in a collaborative environment manage activities in the workflow process. In particular, workflow management applications are designed to electronically route the right information to the right participant at the right time. It enables the flow of work between participants within the same organization or different organizations to be defined and tracked.
Conventional workflow management systems, however, do not ensure that only an authorized user is permitted to perform an activity. Consequently, the integrity and security of the process can be compromised. For example, a task-list manager, whose function is to distribute activities among users, may have unlimited access to information relating to the activities. The access to confidential or private information is not necessary and should be avoided.
As established above, there is an increasing need for a secured workflow environment that enables identification of privileged participants, verifies access to private information relating to the activities and enforces control over the execution of activities.